James Burke - A Morning for Flamingos

The ceiling, the walls, the cheap furniture, were dotted with blood as though it had been slung there in patterns. Above the kitchen doorway, painted redly into the plaster, were the words you are ded. The blood had run in strings down the plaster and dripped onto the linoleum.

But my bedroom was untouched, and I thought I had seen the worst of it until I looked into the bathroom. The toilet lid was closed, but blood and water had swelled over the lip and streamed down the white porcelain, too thick and dark for the dilution that should have taken place. Written with a ballpoint pen on a damp sheet of lined paper that lay on the toilet lid were the words dont flush, my baby is inside.

I stuck the.45 through the back of my belt and started to raise the lid, then withdrew my hand. Don't rattle, I thought. They didn't do it, they didn't do that .

I went into the kitchen, tore off a section of paper towel, folded it in a neat square, and went back into the bathroom to lift the toilet lid. My neighbor's bluetick dog floated in the purple water, one eye of his severed head staring up at me, his entrails bulging out of the slit that ran from his testicles to a flap of skin on his neck.

I dropped the bloody piece of paper towel in the wastebasket, turned around, and saw Bootsie frozen in the doorway, her hand pinched to her mouth, her cheeks discolored, her pulse leaping in her neck.

She sat alone in the bedroom while I talked to two uniformed cops who had been called by the apartment owner. A black man from the city health department dipped the dog's remains out of the toilet with a fishnet, while my neighbors stared through the open front door of the apartment. I told the cops a second time that I had no idea who had done it.

One of them wrote on his clipboard. There were red marks on his nose where he had taken off his sunglasses, and his sky-blue shirt was stretched tightly across his muscular chest.

"You think maybe somebody just doesn't like you?" he asked.

"Could be," I said.

"You're not in a cult, are you?" He grinned at the corner of his mouth.

"No, I don't know much about cults."

He put his ballpoint pen in his shirt pocket.

"Well, there're a lot of spaced-out dopers around these days. Maybe that's all there was to it," he said. "I'd get some better locks, though."

"Thank y'all for coming out."

"Mr. Robicheaux, you say you used to be a police officer?"

"That's right."

"You never heard about a nailed-up frog before?"

I cleared my throat and looked away from his eyes.

"Maybe I heard something. It's a little vague."

He smiled to himself, then wrote out a number on a piece of paper and handed it to me.

"Here's the report number in case you or the owner needs it for an insurance claim. Call us if we can help you in any way," he said.

They left and closed the door behind them. There's a cop who won't have to write traffic tickets too long, I thought.

Back in the bedroom Bootsie sat on the side of my bed, her hands folded in her lap. Her cotton dress was covered with gray and pink flowers.

"I'm sorry you had to arrive in the middle of all this," I said.

"Dave, that officer was talking about a cult. Do you know people like that?"

"It wasn't done by cultists. He knew it, too."

"What?"

"I'm supposed to think I've got a gris-gris on me. You remember a Negro woman named Gros Mama Goula in New Iberia?"

"She ran a brothel?"

"That's the one. She'd like to shake up my cookie bag. She either sent some of her people over here to do this, or it was done by a guy named Jimmie Lee Boggs. But my guess is that the two of them are working together."

"I just don't understand."

"These are people who for one reason or another would like me to disappear. So they put on this gris-gris show. But whoever did this has probably spent some time in a southern prison. A frog with a nail through it means a guy had better jump or he's going to have a bad fate."

I saw her face becoming more and more clouded.

"Bootsie, these guys are dimwits. They're always looking for something new or clever to dress up their act. When they do some bullshit like this, it's because they're running scared."

"I've heard that name Boggs," she said. "I get the feeling he's taken very seriously."

"All right, he's got the contract on Tony C. He's also the guy who shot me last summer. But I think Jimmie Lee's scared. It's turned around on him."

"Dave, what in God's name are you doing? Why did you bring me here this morning?"

"I'm not sure, Boots."

"God, you're incredible."

"Maybe I don't think I'm doing right by you."

This time her eyes saw meaning in my face.

"I hurt you real bad a long time ago. I don't want to do it again," I said.

Her eyes kept looking up at me. I pulled up a chair and sat across from her.

"Maybe you have some regrets?" she said softly.

"I didn't say that."

"You love the past, Dave. You love Louisiana the way it used to be. It's changed. Forever. We are, too. Maybe you're discovering that." She smiled.

"I don't know. I don't learn anything very easily."

Her eyes went down in her lap, and she brushed her fingers over the fine hair on the back of her wrist.

"Dave, did you do something that bothers you?" she said.

"No."

"Are we talking about another woman?"

"I'm mixed up with a bunch of people I can't think straight about right now."

She was quiet for a moment; then she said, "Who is she?"

"I haven't been untrue to you." The words sounded hollow, marital, the banal end of something.

"Is she one of Tony's crowd?"

"I'm in a situation where I'm going to have to hurt some people. I don't feel good about it. I got mixed up in it because I was shot by Jimmie Lee Boggs. Now I'm at a place where I don't understand my own feelings."

"You're an undercover cop, aren't you?"

"I've gotten involved with people whom cops sometimes call lowlifes or geeks or greaseballs. Except I don't feel that way about all of them now, and I should. That's what it amounts to, Bootsie."

"Do you want it over between us?"

"I don't think it can ever be over between us."

"You shouldn't count on that," she said, and I felt my heart drop.

"Can you tell me why you were over at Baylor?" I said.

"Not today. No more today."

"You're going to close me out? You're not going to let me be your friend when you need one?"

"Do you love me or the past, Dave? Do you think I'm the past? Do I look like the past? Am I the summer of 'fifty-seven?"

Her eyes and her voice were kind, but I had no answer for her or myself, and the room was so quiet that I could hear the rustle of banana leaves outside the window.

Three hours later I was sitting at a redwood table by the side of Tony's tennis court while he hit balls at Jess Ornella on the opposite side of the net. Jess wore a red sweatsuit and blue boat shoes and clubbed at the balls as though he were under attack. Three dozen balls must have littered the clay court, most of them on his side.

"I tell you what, why don't you get us some iced tea?" Tony said.

"I told you I ain't any good at games," Jess said.

"You're doing good. Keep working at it. Your stroke's getting better all the time," Tony said. He sat down at the table with me, patting his neck and face with a towel, and watched Jess walk toward the house. "He looks like a hog on ice, but you ought to see him fly an airplane."

"Jess?"

"His old man was a crop duster during the Depression. Jess can thread a needle with anything that has wings on it. One time he flew us upside down under a power line."

Unconsciously I touched the stitches in my lip. They felt as tight and hard as wire.